Hiring Assessment Tips and Tools: One Firm's Firsthand Experience

The financial impact of making successful hiring choices is as significant, long-term, as any other effort in law firm management. The negative results of poor choices can be a long-lasting burden or even a marketing or reputation nightmare. If only hiring people were as simple a process as evaluating a business, managing one's own practice would be much easier.

Most firms have had the misfortune of finding the 'perfect candidate' for a position, only to discover later that the individual was, literally, too good to be true. After a series of unsuccessful attempts at finding qualified new hires, we at Seigneur Gustafson LLP knew we had to find a better way to evaluate potential employees beyond just hiring them to see how they would work. Through this effort, we identified six key character elements that are critical to consider when evaluating a new hire:

• Values systems and personal ethics;
• Perceptions related to compensation and money;
• Work habits;
• Career and personal goals;
• Strengths and limitations; and
• Personality roles ' dominant or subordinate.

However, without a human resources staff devoted exclusively to assessing every new hire candidate on these specific character traits, this would be a time-consuming and burdensome task for most firms, even though the long-term benefits would be significant.

Assessment Tools

Fortunately, we found there are several employee/new hire assessment tools available, including the Predictive Index Survey (www.piworldwide.com), the Kolbe Index (www.kolbe.com), Harrison-Innerview (www.harrison-innerview.com), Hire Select by Criteria Corporation (www.criteriacorp.com), and many others. Many of these testing resources leverage off of work conducted in the 1960s by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers (www.myersbriggs.org), which is an offshoot of their study of C.G. Jung and his pioneering work on psychological personality types that was first translated into English in the 1920s.

One tool we have found has been particularly helpful to us in the screening of potential applicants on the very personality elements we have identified. We were made aware of Staff Development Services ('SDS'), an organization that could surprisingly accurately identify how a person would behave within our organization before we ever hired him or her. (www.staffdevelopmentservices.com). There was a bit of skepticism on our part initially, so we decided to perform the survey on several people already working in our firm in order to evaluate the instrument's accuracy.

SDS utilizes the Simmons Personal Survey, a survey that assesses 57 performance indicators, developed by authors of the book Measuring Emotional Intelligence, Steve P. Simmons, M.Ed. and John C. Simmons. This tool can be administered to any level of staff. We found that the instrument provides an accurate portrayal of candidates by measuring 13 different behavioral tendencies, such as energy and stress levels, optimism, self-esteem, assertiveness, tolerance, etc. But the greatest benefit we derived was from having SDS compare the person to the role we expect him/her to fulfill. The SDS survey measures a person's character rather than personality and the depth of information provided has definitely helped our firm avoid making critical hiring mistakes.

In one instance we had a bad experience with a previous partner. SDS found we were excited about hiring another person who was qualified for the position and was, coincidentally, quite similar to the partner from whom we had such a painful disassociation. After a bit of self-examination, we decided we did not want to risk bringing someone on board that conveyed tendencies that were similar to those we had just spent months trying to distance ourselves from. John Beane, president of SDS, indicates their survey provides something similar to an X-ray of a person's character and that accuracy permits them to achieve a better than 90% success rate on identifying superior candidates for a job once they understand the position.

After we began to identify the positive characteristics of our best associates, it then became a more routine process for SDS to compare a new candidate to those behaviors and make their recommendations. Beane, who has 20 years of experience in these types of assessments, indicates that people with the appropriate behaviors have a far better opportunity to succeed within your organization than those who simply have the necessary skills.

According to Beane, most tests are not sophisticated enough to achieve much more than a 50% accuracy factor, whereas SDS's survey can predict behaviors that may not be seen for years. He has told us of one instance where a gentleman whose survey had indicated a certain negative behavior could occur, had been employed for more than two years, but the hiring firm had never seen him behave that way. Shortly after the firm told Beane that SDS's assessment had been wrong, the man acted exactly as had been predicted.

Conclusion

We have used these resources both as a mentoring tool for individuals already in our firm and to screen candidates for positions ranging from administrative assistants to potential equity-level lateral hires. If hiring the ideal candidates to support professional practice is presenting your firm with a daunting challenge, we suggest you consider using one of the available screening programs to test potential candidates for character elements that predict success within your organization. The financial impact of making better hiring choices is as significant as any effort in firm management. It can reduce turnover at any level within the enterprise, lead to higher sustained profits, and indirectly foster a much more cohesive and dedicated workforce.

Ronald L. Seigneur, CPA/ABV, a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, and Brenda M. Clarke, CPA/ ABV are both partners of Seigneur Gustafson LLP CPAs, located in Lake- wood, CO. They can be reached at 303-980-1111 or www.cpavalue.com.

The financial impact of making successful hiring choices is as significant, long-term, as any other effort in law firm management. The negative results of poor choices can be a long-lasting burden or even a marketing or reputation nightmare. If only hiring people were as simple a process as evaluating a business, managing one's own practice would be much easier.

Most firms have had the misfortune of finding the 'perfect candidate' for a position, only to discover later that the individual was, literally, too good to be true. After a series of unsuccessful attempts at finding qualified new hires, we at Seigneur Gustafson LLP knew we had to find a better way to evaluate potential employees beyond just hiring them to see how they would work. Through this effort, we identified six key character elements that are critical to consider when evaluating a new hire:

• Values systems and personal ethics;
• Perceptions related to compensation and money;
• Work habits;
• Career and personal goals;
• Strengths and limitations; and
• Personality roles ' dominant or subordinate.

However, without a human resources staff devoted exclusively to assessing every new hire candidate on these specific character traits, this would be a time-consuming and burdensome task for most firms, even though the long-term benefits would be significant.

Assessment Tools

Fortunately, we found there are several employee/new hire assessment tools available, including the Predictive Index Survey (www.piworldwide.com), the Kolbe Index (www.kolbe.com), Harrison-Innerview (www.harrison-innerview.com), Hire Select by Criteria Corporation (www.criteriacorp.com), and many others. Many of these testing resources leverage off of work conducted in the 1960s by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers (www.myersbriggs.org), which is an offshoot of their study of C.G. Jung and his pioneering work on psychological personality types that was first translated into English in the 1920s.

One tool we have found has been particularly helpful to us in the screening of potential applicants on the very personality elements we have identified. We were made aware of Staff Development Services ('SDS'), an organization that could surprisingly accurately identify how a person would behave within our organization before we ever hired him or her. (www.staffdevelopmentservices.com). There was a bit of skepticism on our part initially, so we decided to perform the survey on several people already working in our firm in order to evaluate the instrument's accuracy.

SDS utilizes the Simmons Personal Survey, a survey that assesses 57 performance indicators, developed by authors of the book Measuring Emotional Intelligence, Steve P. Simmons, M.Ed. and John C. Simmons. This tool can be administered to any level of staff. We found that the instrument provides an accurate portrayal of candidates by measuring 13 different behavioral tendencies, such as energy and stress levels, optimism, self-esteem, assertiveness, tolerance, etc. But the greatest benefit we derived was from having SDS compare the person to the role we expect him/her to fulfill. The SDS survey measures a person's character rather than personality and the depth of information provided has definitely helped our firm avoid making critical hiring mistakes.

In one instance we had a bad experience with a previous partner. SDS found we were excited about hiring another person who was qualified for the position and was, coincidentally, quite similar to the partner from whom we had such a painful disassociation. After a bit of self-examination, we decided we did not want to risk bringing someone on board that conveyed tendencies that were similar to those we had just spent months trying to distance ourselves from. John Beane, president of SDS, indicates their survey provides something similar to an X-ray of a person's character and that accuracy permits them to achieve a better than 90% success rate on identifying superior candidates for a job once they understand the position.

After we began to identify the positive characteristics of our best associates, it then became a more routine process for SDS to compare a new candidate to those behaviors and make their recommendations. Beane, who has 20 years of experience in these types of assessments, indicates that people with the appropriate behaviors have a far better opportunity to succeed within your organization than those who simply have the necessary skills.

According to Beane, most tests are not sophisticated enough to achieve much more than a 50% accuracy factor, whereas SDS's survey can predict behaviors that may not be seen for years. He has told us of one instance where a gentleman whose survey had indicated a certain negative behavior could occur, had been employed for more than two years, but the hiring firm had never seen him behave that way. Shortly after the firm told Beane that SDS's assessment had been wrong, the man acted exactly as had been predicted.

Conclusion

We have used these resources both as a mentoring tool for individuals already in our firm and to screen candidates for positions ranging from administrative assistants to potential equity-level lateral hires. If hiring the ideal candidates to support professional practice is presenting your firm with a daunting challenge, we suggest you consider using one of the available screening programs to test potential candidates for character elements that predict success within your organization. The financial impact of making better hiring choices is as significant as any effort in firm management. It can reduce turnover at any level within the enterprise, lead to higher sustained profits, and indirectly foster a much more cohesive and dedicated workforce.

Ronald L. Seigneur, CPA/ABV, a member of this newsletter's Board of Editors, and Brenda M. Clarke, CPA/ ABV are both partners of Seigneur Gustafson LLP CPAs, located in Lake- wood, CO. They can be reached at 303-980-1111 or www.cpavalue.com.